The Purpose and Mission of Poetry In Difficult Times, A Greek View (Manolis Anagnostakis)

Manolis Anagnostakis wrote this in late 1968 or early in 1969. It was published later in his slim volume "To Perithorio '68-'69", Athens 1985. The book's title means "The Margin, '68-'69". I was re-reading it yesterday, along with Manolis' powerful poems, and I thought the comparison between the situation of the two poets he describes below deserved a wider readership in these difficult times.

Who is the true poet, he asks? The one who sits in a comfortable office, talking to a polite, civilised visitor about the Mission of Poetry in our times, complaining about the indifference of young people towards the language, and pontificating about the 'multifaceted complications of the spiritual and intellectual problems of our contradictory times' OR the poet sitting in a very different kind of room with four extremely impolite and uncivilised visitors- torturers who strip him naked, lash him, stub lighted cigarettes on his hands and throw buckets of water over him in order to bring him back to consciousness, to start the process all over again?

Thank goodness times have changed. I had been living and working in Corfu until a few months before this was written.